think differently big

What makes a Tweet Relevant?

That’s the question that both Microsoft and Google are trying to answer since they signed deals with Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have these small “snippets of knowledge” included in their search results.

Couple of days ago, Google has announced that they are starting to push out results from Twitter and Facebook (this hasn’t reached all accounts yet though), so you’d expect that they came out with an approach for measuring the relevance. And I have found the following slide (thanks to ☞ TechCrunch):

In case you cannot read it from the low quality picture, here are the 10 metrics, which are pretty cryptic though,

• Language model (?)
• Tweet quality (?)
• Author quality (?)
• Probability of relevance
• Semantics
• Real-time URL resolution (my comment: probably somehow similar to the old PageRank but reversed: the quality of the tweet is determined by the quality of the links included)
• Query registration (?)
• Query hotness
• Query volume fluctuations
• Topicality (my comment: isn’t this more or less the same with the above Semantics?)

Right now, I cannot read between the lines of this algorithm, but there seems to be 3 dimensions that are considered: the author, the tweet and the included links, the query. I guess we will have to wait a bit longer to find out more about it and to see if it works or not.

Microsoft Demos Silverlight on the iPhone

For a couple of seconds I really thought this is the announcement of the year. Don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot of things to be read between the lines from such a headline. But then I paused for another second and re-read the announcement… and I realized there isn’t much about it (like with most of PR these days).

Let me reformulate the title so everyone can see why it is not a big deal: Microsoft has demoed streaming video from a “Silverlight server” in the ☞ H.264 format. The video is available in web pages through the usage of the HTML5 

On Google and The Future of News

Google ☞ reacted pretty quick (Dec.1st) to the pressure news corporations put on them when mentioning delisting from the search engine. In case you missed this part see the resource section for a couple of links to give you more context.

What exactly are they offering? Nothing: 1/ a change to the “First Click Free” program (see link for more details ☞ Changes in First Click Free), whose implementation responsibility is still on the published side and 2/ crawling and indexing of preview pages, which is something that they were already doing.

Then, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has an article published on WSJ: ☞ How Google Can Help Newspapers in which he reinforces the Google benefit:

We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.

Such a statement is a bit confusing to me as it sounds like the users generating this traffic were not looking to but they were convinced by Google to check the newspapers. And this sounds pretty incorrect. People are going to Google looking for something. If Google wouldn’t be there, they would go somewhere else to look for their answers and so those billions of visits will not be lost.

The only interesting part of the article is his perspective on the future of content consumption:

It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.

Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. […]

Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I’d never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.

Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age

1. More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.
2. Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller.
3. The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

These are not mine. It is Joshua-Michéle Ross that published these three paradoxes of the internet over a three article series on O’Reilly Radar: ☞ part 1, ☞ part2 and ☞ part 3

While you don’t have to agree with him, I think you should look around (on the internet though) and see if you cannot find good signs of these paradoxes. Here are the samples I came up with:

• Paradox 1: Facebook success comes in my opinion from us getting more separated and trying to get back to our friends. Facebook example can be used also for paradox 3: getting more public is empowering, but the more know about you the less control you have about the information out there about yourself.

Online Indentity: Tomorrow Belongs to What You Are, Do and Befriend Today

our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data:

• Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.)
• Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online)
• Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me)

— ☞ The Future Is All About Context

Facebook is already capturing all this data and is probably the platform knowing the most about us. I guess the second one is Google. Or is it vice-versa?

Now if you don’t see the implications by yourself, I would encourage you to read the pros and cons of having all this data “out there” on Jeff Jonas’ article: ☞ Your Movements Speak for Themselves.

Tomorrow Belongs to What You Are, Do and Befriend Today

Digital Strangelove

… tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

— Clay Shirky